1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to management of information technology (IT) resources, and more specifically relates to an apparatus and method for visualization of web services distributed management resources.
2. Background Art
Computer system managers have the complex task of dealing with many different computer resources. Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) is a new standard for web services management that provides a consistent, flexible interface to manage disparate resources without knowing their types, models, or their implementation technologies. The WSDM standards specify a common messaging protocol for managed resources and their consumers. The WSDM standard specifies how the manageability of a resource is made available to manageability consumers via Web Services.
Part of the WSDM standard describes Management Using Web Services (MUWS). This part of the standard incorporates management of IT resources. In order to leverage the value of WSDM, IT resource producers model them or expose them as WSDM resources. This provides a standard way for customers, third parties, and other IT resource providers to manage these resources. In a customer environment where IT resources have been provided by multiple suppliers, exposing the IT resources as WSDM resources gives the customer a way to manage them all consistently, by using tools that are built to the WSDM standard. As used herein, exposing an IT resource as a WSDM resource means to provide a software interface that presents the IT resource as a WSDM resource.
However, WSDM presents a challenge in the area of visualization of resources. Management tools typically provide a management console or user interface that provides information to system administrators about the managed resources via tables, graphical topology maps, and other views. The standard features of WSDM allow management tool providers to display and browse managed resources and their properties on a management console. However, WSDM does not readily enable management tools to provide a robust management console or user interface as users are accustomed to when managing resources from a management console. A WSDM console could be enhanced to provide a better visualization of the resources, but the console would need to be updated or reprogrammed each time a new type of resource is added to the system because much of the type-specific data needed by the management console to provide the desired visualization for each resource is not defined by WSDM.
A management console using WSDM would suffer from several limitations. For example, a WSDM console would be capable of displaying only a rudimentary view of the IT assets in the system. It would lack the ability to abstract the raw information or provide language translation using only the limited data available from the WSDM resource. Further, there is no facility within WSDM to provide the set of operational actions that are valid at a given time to provide context sensitive options.
Without a way to more effectively capitalize on the WSDM environment and provide a visualization of WSDM resources, it will be costly to provide system administrators with management systems to effectively visualize and manage IT resources.